Step One: Screw Up a War. Step Two: Run for Senate.

Now this is how you pick a political winner: find a guy who let a war go off the rails and presided over a torture regime and get him to run for Senate.

Ricardo Sanchez, the disgraced retired three-star, has decided he’s not done with public service. Prodding from Texas Democrats is leading Sanchez to prepare for an apparent Senate bid. “After the military, I decided that socially, I’m a progressive, a fiscal conservative and a strong supporter, obviously, of national defense,” he told McClatchy.

Congratulations, Texas Democratic Party: you are on the verge of a new level in cynicism. Sanchez’s tenure running the Iraq war saw a humiliated and cashiered Iraqi military metastasize into an insurgency that killed and maimed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Under pressure from the Pentagon, he approved abusive detention and interrogation practices for Abu Ghraib that resulted in the U.S.’ most damaging wartime scandal since Vietnam. What could possibly interrupt Sanchez’s deserved fade into obscurity?

“He’s the one guy who could unite the Hispanic vote,” former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes told McClatchy. “He’ll get the conservative Hispanic businessman.”

Amazing. Noah all but begged Democrats to stay away from Sanchez in 2007, when his bitterness with the Bush administration first led Dems to cynically discover the general’s hidden virtues.

But it wasn’t just George Bush that Sanchez derided. It was practically everyone out of uniform. In an October 2007 speech, Sanchez bashed Bush, Congress, the media and American society in general for lacking “moral courage in this war effort.” About the only responsibility Sanchez could let himself shoulder was to allow that “mistakes have been made by the American military,” as if it was the entire armed services who authorized dogs to menace Iraqi detainees.

Sanchez’s blend of self pity and martial triumphalism could turn out to be a political winner. But think what a message that would send. Texas Democrats would ask voters to excuse wartime disaster and torture. It’s easy to see what Sanchez and the Dems get out of this. Actually, it’s easier to smell it.